After eight years in a variety of roles at Forrester, I’ve joined the Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) team as a Vice President and Principal Analyst. I’ll be collaborating with analyst colleagues (please see below) on I&O’s forthcoming Workforce Enablement Playbook. I&O pros face the constant challenge of empowering their companies’ workers with devices and services to make them successful in their jobs… as well as navigating the growing challenge of employees who choose to bring their own technology to work instead.

More specifically, I’ll be researching at least five issues pertinent to I&O pros:

Today’s Data Digest topic comes from a personal observation involving my family. Last weekend, my husband was working on our Mac, I was doing some online shopping on my work laptop, and one of our kids was playing games on my husband’s work laptop. And I suddenly wondered: “Is this how a typical household looks, with every household member having their own PC?” So I dived into our Technographics data and found that we are indeed not atypical for our generation: More than 80% of US households have some type of PC, and almost half have more than one. About 77% of Gen X has a desktop PC at home, and 61%, a laptop.

Whether people have one PC or two, and whether those PCs are desktops, laptops, or netbooks, PCs serve different functions for different generations in the household. While Gen Yers are more likely to use their computer for media activities like playing games or watching TV, Gen Xers and Boomers use theirs for more practical functions, such as word processing or managing personal or family finances.

With the adoption of more and more devices that can connect to Wi-Fi, it’s interesting to understand the uptake of home networks. Forrester's Technographics® data shows that 30% of online Europeans have already set up a wireless home network, and a further 11% are planning to get one in the next six months. The adoption of wireless home networks has grown in Europe since 2006, while the adoption of wired networks is declining (dropping from 12% in 2006 to 6% in 2009).

Three-quarters of online Europeans with a wireless home network share an Internet connection among multiple PCs, and 17% have already connected their PC to their TV set. Wireless networks are especially popular among families and multiple-PC households: 86% of wireless home network owners have more than one PC at home, and 40% have children living at home.

Product strategists struggle with the issue of value all the time: What constitutes a revenue-maximizing price for my product, given the audience I’m targeting, the competition I’m trying to beat, the channel for purchase, and the product’s overall value proposition?

There are tools like conjoint analysis that can help product strategists test price directly via consumer research. However, there’s a bigger strategic question in the background: How can companies create and sustain consistently higher prices than their key competitors over the long term?

The Mac represents a good case study for this business problem. Macs have long earned a premium over comparable Windows PCs. Though prices for Macs have come down over time, they remain relatively more expensive, on average, than Windows-based PCs. In fact, they’ve successfully cornered the market on higher-end PCs: According to companies that track the supply side, perhaps 90% of PCs that sold for over $1,000 in Q4, 2009 were Macs.

Macs share common characteristics with Windows PCs on the hardware front – ever since Apple switched to Intel processors about four years ago, they’ve had comparable physical elements. But the relative pricing for Macs has remained advantageous to Apple. At the same time, the Mac has gained market share and is bringing new consumers into the Mac family – for example, about half of consumers who bought their Mac in an Apple Store in Q1, 2010 were new to the Mac platform. So Apple is doing something right here – providing value to consumers to make them willing to pay more.